#Taull1123. Immersive experience in a World Heritage Site (or Augmented Reality without devices)

#Taull1123 is an immersive experience on-site, that brings the visitors of the Romanesque church of Sant Climent de Taüll (in the World Heritage Site Vall de Boí) to the past, precisely to the year 1123, when the apse of the church was painted with the iconic figures of God and Saints. Those paintings were moved to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona in the year 1920, and now, with this project, they are virtually returned to the walls of the church thanks to a mapping structure of six high quality projectors. Over the real remains of the Romanesque paintings, the paintings of the museum are projected, exactly in its original place, where they were, which becomes a truly augmented reality experience, but without mobile devices, for all the visitors.

Every half an hour, a 9 minutes audiovisual show dives into the past and represents the moment of the painting, 800 years ago, in 1123, with the different stages and figures, and finishes with a simulation of the paintings complete as they were:

For the creation of this show, all the fragments of the original paintings, now in the Museum, were photographed, studied, and digitally restored. The missing parts were reconstructed by analyzing the remaining parts and the architectural and pictorial patterns of the ensemble. The process of the different layers of lines and colors of the original painting was rebuilt too for recreating the painting by brush effects. The music was composed and arranged using real sounds of the surroundings of the church and medieval instruments digitally remastered.

You can find a lot of resources about this project in its WEB: 3D apse, 2 layer magnifying glass, gigaphotos … And the visitors reactions in Twitter or Instagram with the hashtags #taull1123 here: http://www.romanicobert.cat/taull1123 (make sure to select english language on the upper right corner of the site). More information can be found here: http://pantocrator.cat/en/

This project has been built by the Goverment of Catalonia, “La Caixa” Fundation and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, and is part of the cultural program “Open Romanesque”.

Acknowledgements

Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya and Obra Social “la Caixa”